I was wondering why my mining productivity only cost 1 pack, I was about to start rifling through my mods to find a guilty culprit :p

Hotfixes like this remind me of the Nerd³ video that got me into factorio, where he credited the game by saying he could only find one bug, and that was just a nuisance with the early multiplayer code. Well done Devs

It's not because it's stable, nor because I don't want bugs, that's just how long it's been since I've fired up the game.
Though, when 0.16.37/38 was released, I didn't update on purpose at that time, because I didn't want to deal with the bugs when I was going to make a couple of edits to my mods.... but I've not fired up the game since then.

That's the stable, 0.16.45 is experimental. I'd have thought that you know how that works

I get how that works, but why? Why go for a .0.16.x experimental instead of a 0.17.x experimental? Why stay on the same version when you declared it stable? Shouldn't stable be the last version in this chain, and then you start a new experimental?

Because the changes between 0.16 versions are very minor. If they bumped the version to 0.17, then 0.18 etc every time they made a minor bug-fix update to a stable release, we would be at 0.80 or something be now.

0.17 is supposed to include a GUI rework, a new rendering framework etc. Major features.